He held it out, and Valencia, who was nearest, caught sight of it.

"Ai! Tula!" she said in reproof, "you to take that when the poor----"

Tula flashed one killing look at her, and Valencia stopped dead, and turned an ashen gray, and Rotil watching!

"Ah--ha! I thought it!" he jeered. "Now whose trick is it to make me a fool? Come, sift this thing! You," to Valencia, "have looked on this before. Whose is it?"

"Senor--I----"

"So!" he said with a sort of growl in the voice, "something chokes you? Look at me, not at the others! Also listen:--if a lie is told to me, every liar here will go before a firing squad. Whose is this crucifix?"

Valencia's eyes looked sorrow on Tula, still under his hand, and then on the wood and silver thing held up before her. The sun was just rolling hot and red above the mountains, and Rotil's s.h.a.ggy head was outlined in a sort of curious radiance as the light struck the white wall across the patio at his back. Even the silver of the crucifix caught a glimmer of it, and to Valencia he looked like the warrior padres of whom her grandmother used to tell, who would thunder h.e.l.l's terrors on the frightened neophytes until the bravest would grovel in the dust and do penances unbelievable.

That commanding picture came between her and Rotil,--the outlaw and soldier and patriot. She stumbled forward with a pleading gesture towards Tula.

"Excellency, the child does no harm. She is a stranger in the house.

She has picked it up perhaps when lost by the senora, and----"

"What senora?"

"She who is most sorrowful guest here, Excellency, and her arms still bruised from the iron chains of El Aleman."

"And her name?"

"Excellency, it is the woman saved from your man by the Americano senor here beside you. And,--she asked to be nameless while sheltered at Mesa Blanca."

"But not to me! So this is a game between you two--" and he looked from Tula to Kit with sinister threat in his eyes, "it is then _your_ woman who----"

"Ramon--no!" said a voice from the far shadows, and the black shawled figure stood erect and cast off the m.u.f.fling disguise. Her pale face shone like a star above all the kneeling Indians.

"G.o.d of heaven!" he muttered, and his hand fell from the shoulder of Tula. "You--_you_ are one of the women who knelt here for vengeance?"

"For justice," she said, "but I was here for a reason different;--it was a place to hide. No one helped me, let the child go! Give these women what they ask or deny them, but send them away. To them I am nameless and unknown. You can see that even my presence is a thing of fear to them,--let them go!"

He stared at her across those frightened dark faces. It was true they drew away from her in terror; her sudden uprising was as if she had materialized from the cold tiles of the chapel floor. Kit noted that their startled eyes were wide with awe, and knew that they also felt they were gazing on a beauty akin to that of the pictured saints. Even the glimmer of the candle touching her perfect cheek and brow added to the unearthly appearance there in the shadows.

But Ramon Rotil gazed at her across a wider s.p.a.ce than that marked by the kneeling Indian women! Four years were bridged by that look, and where the others saw a pale Madonna, he saw a barefooted child weaving flowers of the mountain for a shrine where poverty prevented a candle.

He had sold maize to buy candles, and shoes for her feet, and she had given him the little brown wooden crucifix.

Once in the height of her reign of beauty in the hacienda of Perez, a ragged brown boy from the hills had lain in wait for her under the oleanders, and thrust a tightly bound package of corn husks into her hand, and her maid regarded with amazement the broken fragments of a wooden cross so poor and cheap that even the most poverty stricken of the peons could own one, and her wonder was great that her mistress wept over the broken pieces and strove to fit them together again.

And now it lay in his hand, bound and framed in silver wires delicately wrought.

He had traveled farther than she during the years between, and the memento of the past made him know it.

"Ramon, let them go!" she repeated with gentle appeal.

"Yes," he said, taking a deep breath as if rousing from a trance, "that is best. Child--see to it, and have your way. Senor, will you arrange that the senora has what comfort there is here? Our horses wait, and work waits----"

He saw Valencia go with protecting, outstretched hands to Jocasta, and turned away.

Jocasta never moved. To save her friends from his rage she had spoken, and to her the big moment of humiliation dreamed of and feared had come and been lived through. He had seen her on her knees among all that brown herd made up of such women as his mother and her mother had been. From mistress of a palace on an estate large as many European kingdoms she had become an outcast with marks of fetters on her arms, while he was knelt to as a G.o.d by the simple people of the ranges, and held power of life and death over a wide land!

Kit could not even guess at all the tempestuous background of the drama enacted there in the chill of the chapel at sunrise, but the clash of those two outlaw souls suddenly on guard before each other, thrilled him by the unexpected. Rotil, profane, ruthless, and jeering, had suddenly grown still before the face of a woman from whom he turned away.

"Late! An hour late!" he grumbled, hobbling back to the plaza. "What did I tell you? h.e.l.l of women! Well, your d.a.m.ned little crane got what she started after--huh! Why did she lie?"

"Well, you know, General," said Kit doubtfully, "that the enmity between you and Jose Perez is no secret. Even the children talk of it, and wish success to you--I've heard that one do it! Dona Jocasta is of a Perez household, so it was supposed you would make prisoner anyone of their group. And Tula--well, I reckon Tula listened last night to some rather hard things the senora has lived through at Soledad, and knew she would rather die here than go back there."

Kit realized he was on delicate ground when trying to explain any of the actions of any of the black and tan group to each other, but he sought the safest way out, and drew a breath of relief at his success, for Rotil listened closely, nodding a.s.sent, yet frowning in some perplexity.

"Um! what does that mean,--rather die than go back?" he demanded. "No one has told me why the lady has come to Mesa Blanca, or what she is doing here. I don't see--What the devil ails you?"

For Kit stared at him incredulous, and whistled softly.

"Haven't you got it _yet_?" he asked. "Last night you joked about a girl Marto stole, and we stole from him again. Don't you realize now who that girl is?"

"_Jocasta!_"

It was the first time he had uttered her name and there was a low terrible note in his voice, half choked by smothered rage.

"But how could Marto,--or why should--" he began and then halted, checked by various conflicting facts, and stared frowningly at Rhodes who again strove to explain that of which he had little knowledge.

"General, I reckon Marto was square to your interests about everything but the woman Perez and Conrad sent north into the desert, and it was Marto's job to see that she never left it alive. Evidently he did not report that extra task to you, for he meant to save the woman for himself. But even at that, General, you've got to give him credit. He says she bewitched him, and he couldn't kill her, and he wouldn't let the others have her. Also he risked a whale of a beating up, and some lead souvenirs, in trying to save her, even if it was for himself. So you see, Marto was only extra human, and is a good man. His heart's about broke to think he failed you, and I'll bet he wouldn't fail you again in a thousand years!"

"Yes, you have the right of that," agreed Rotil. "I did not know; I don't know yet what this means about Perez and--and----"

"None of us do, General," stated Kit. "I heard Valencia say it must be something only a confessor could know,--but it must be rather awful at that! She was started north like an insane criminal, hidden and in chains. She explains nothing, but General, you have now the two men at Soledad who made the plan, and you have here Marto who was their tool--and perhaps--at Soledad--" he paused questioning.

"Sure! that is what will be done," decided Rotil. "See to it, you, after we are gone. Bring Dona Jocasta to Soledad with as much show of respect as can be mustered in a poor land, your girl and Isidro's wife to go along, and any comforts you can find. Yes, that is the best!

Some way we will get to the bottom of this well. She must know a lot if they did not dare let her live, and Marto--well, you make a good talk for him, straight too--Marto will go with me. Tell no one anything. Make your own plans. By sunset I will have time for this mystery of the chains of Dona Jocasta. Be there at Soledad by sunset."

"At your command, General."

Then Chappo and Fidelio helped their leader into the saddle. Marto, crestfallen and silently antic.i.p.ating the worst, was led out next; a _reata_ pa.s.sed around the saddle horn and circling his waist was fastened back of the saddle. His hands were free to guide his horse, but Chappo, with a wicked looking gun and three full cartridge belts, rode a few paces back of him to see that he made no forbidden use of them.

Kit watched them ride east while the long line of women of Palomitas took up the trail over the mesa to the north. Their high notes of a song came back to him,--one of those wailing chants of a score of verses dear to the Mexican heart. In any other place he would have deemed it a funeral dirge with variations, but with Indian women at sunrise it meant tuneful content.

Kit listened with a shiver. Because of his own vagrant airs they had called him "El Pajarito" when he first drifted south over Mexican trails,--but happy erratic tunefulness was smothered for him temporarily. Over the vast land of riches, smiling in the sun, there brooded the threats of Indian G.o.ds chained, inarticulate, reaching out in unexpected ways for expression through the dusky devotees at hidden shrines. The fact that occasionally they found expression through some perverted fragment from an imported cult was a gruesome joke on the importers. But under the eagle of Mexico, whose wide wings were used as shield by the German vultures across seas, jokes were not popular.

German educators and foreign priests with Austrian affiliations, saw to that. The spiritual harvest in Mexico was not always what the planters antic.i.p.ated,--for curious crops sprung up in wild corners of the land, as Indian grains wrapped in a mummy's robe spring to life under methods of alien culturists.

Vague drifting thoughts like this followed Kit's shiver of repulsion at that Indian joy song over the promise of a veritable live Judas. On him they could wreak a personal vengeance, and go honestly to confession in some future day, with the conviction that they had, by the sufferings they could individually and collectively invent for Judas, in some vague but laudable manner mitigated the sufferings of a white G.o.d far away whose tribulations were dwelt upon much by the foreign priesthood.

He sensed this without a.n.a.lysis, for his was not the a.n.a.lytical mind.

What brain Kit had was fairly well occupied by the fact that his own devoted partner was the moving spirit of that d.a.m.nable pagan _Come, all ye_--drifting back to him from the glorified mesa, flushed golden now by the full sun.

Clodomiro came wearily up from the corral. The boy had gone without sleep or rest until his eyes were heavy and his movements listless.

Like the women of Palomitas he also had worked overtime at the call of Tula, and Kit wondered at the concerted activity--no one had held back or blundered.